Genealogical news from Spokane, Washington, USA, and the Inland Northwest.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

EWGS & NeWGS represented at RootsTech

I'm homewardbounding today from attending RootsTech and it was fun to share learning with friends from home. I shared time with Cecily Kelly, Margie Beldin, Janis Littlefield (TriCities GenSoc) and Karen and Gordy Struve. Other than Gordy's mishap pinching a finger in a folding chair, we had a fab time. The thing I learned that was most impressive to me was this: We can imagine gathering most all of the world's family history information into one place. (FamilySearch and Ancestry are trying to do just that.) What we don't understand is HOW those wonderful young teckie-geeks DO IT.......how they take those million bits of information and turned them into a bezillion bytes that we can access. That was the "Tech" part of RootsTech. And it's complicated beyond my understanding for sure although I did listen and try to "see."

What I do know is this, and our mutual friends agree: The future of genealogy lies with the Internet. I did not say "on" the Internet, I said "with." The time is coming when you can sit in your 'jammies and either access the data directly or search card catalogs and contact repositories directly for more information or search genealogical society websites and then contact them directly for more information. I know it blows my mind to hear explained all the many, many ways to find answers via the Internet. (Again, I did not say ON the Internet.) I thank all those teckie-geeks for helping this to become a reality for us and I'm eager to learn how to fully appreciate and use all that is becoming available to me. I hope you are too.

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